French Fridays Libri Library Review: Monsieur Lecoq, by Émile Gaboriau

     This book was a very pleasant surprise!  Summarizing for Anglophones, as Francophones already know this author, this work preceded Sherlock Holmes, and is very good.  While Holmes has adventure and intrigue, this book has inter-generational cooperation, and history (books)!  Yes, history is important in solving criminal cases, kids!  It also has language learning (ok, it has two trilingual and one at least bilingual characters, all of the languages, of course, figuring importantly in solving the case)!  Apart from the mystery, obviously, there is also a case or two of impossible love, sacrifice, courage, and all of this against the backdrop of the Restoration, Napoleon, and memories of The Terrors during the French Revolution. I cannot imagine for the life of me why this work has not gained the level of appreciation that Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo has gained, as it is quite nearly as good. There is a lot of Latin cited, and this makes it worth reading again in print, which I will do via Project Gutenberg or one of the other Public Domain book sources (sorry, I have no idea whether this book is available other than in the original French, but I imagine that it must be available in at least English).

 

This book is very much worth learning French to read or listen to, imho. 

 

     Once again, thank you to Librivox.org, and thank you to Ezwa for reading this book !   In fact, the way I found this book was by searching for books read by Ezwa, and this one was on that reader’s list.

     And I am STILL Waiting on pins and needles, triple argh!!!, as I schedule this for Lupin Part 3 to start up again, with Omar Sy!!!     

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Je l’ecoutes par librivox, lu par Ezwa:

 

/
Listened to on librivox, thanks to Ezwa’s excellent reading!

 

(Just ask if I forget any translations from my reading updates…)

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🙂 Merci Ezwa !!

Une excellente lectrice !”

Je l’ecoutes gratuitment par Librivox ici…

!!

🙂

“Voila a quoi sert l’histoire, dit-il. Mais je n’ai pas fini, garcon; notre duc de Sairmeuse a nous a aussi son article… Ecoute donc encore: …”

 

merci, encore, Ezwa !

 

 

“Partie 2: et voila l’histoire…”

🙂

 

 

 

 

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Many thanks to all of the volunteers who read these books in the public domain.

 

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any more copies of books by Mr. Dumas    read by native French speakers on Librivox, at the moment.

 

 

 

 

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Shira

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Shira

Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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